5 Bizarre Things You Learn About America Dealing Steroids

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The Steroid User Community Is Shockingly Well Organized

“You’d be shocked at how much of the bodybuilding and weightlifting community is based on steroids. If you see a bodybuilding competition, they’re on gear … You can’t get that big without help. Period.”

Steroids are illegal, and it’d be impossible to objectively confirm this fact. But it’s proooobably worth noting that many bodybuilders wouldn’t dispute our source’s claim.

So, say you’re convinced that steroids are a good decision for you, and you desperately want to become one of the angry, red-faced, veiny men who make America’s gyms so insufferable. The first question is: Should I take my drugs orally, or shoot them up? The second question is: Why am I such an asshole, and is there anything I can do about it?

Only God and self-help books can help you with the latter, but as for the former, Marty says: “When you take oral steroids it’s much worse for you.”

“[But] if you inject into your blood you’ll taste copper and have this cough, tren cough, that can send you to the hospital.”

Tren stands for trenbolone acetate, a powerful steroid Marty started cooking for his new boss: “If you’re in bodybuilding today you’ll be doing trenbolone … it’s 500 times stronger than testosterone.” You can expect 10-15 pounds of muscle gain in eight weeks on trenbolone, but the reported side-effects are pretty vicious:

As for steroids and their long-standing, complex, will-they-won’t-they relationship with assholes, Marty, of course, had a horrific ‘roid rage story to tell us:

“My old roommate, he was on tren and he couldn’t handle it. One night he was trenned out … He was at a bar with his girlfriend … decks her in the jaw, bartender knocks his jaw sideways … kicks him out of the bar, on his way out he sees his girlfriend run to her car with a friend …” and then runs his girlfriend down and starts “stomping on her head.”

She survived, which is about the only good thing we can say about that story.

Hey, let’s talk about candy!

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Before You Know It, You’re Going Global

“We made jellies and candies for a while. We were the bad guys you hear about on the news, … ‘putting drugs in candy.'”

Marty’s tenure as the candyman began when his boss got a wild urge to start shipping and selling their steroids mixed into Jolly Rancher-type things. (Copyright law isn’t huge with illegal drug dealers.) When Marty found out, his eager-to-please self set to work cooking up a test batch:

“I cooked a huge batch of [Jolly Ranchers], we used Kool-Aid, I put it in bowls and put up a Wickr image and he said, ‘Holy shit … you got $1000, what do you need on Amazon?'” Yes, all the key fixtures of Marty’s cooking process were bought from Amazon.com. What, you think drug chemists don’t love two-day shipping? Everybody loves two-day shipping.

josemiguels/Pixabay

Not overnight shipping though. Let’s not go crazy now.

Soon they scaled that side of the operation up, and now it’s big business. Marty didn’t have a birds-eye view to the whole operation, but the parts of it he saw pointed to something sprawling and massive: “[the raw steroid ingredients] came from China, mostly giant factories. There’s a lot that comes from Ukraine because they make steroids mostly for medical use, especially testosterone.”

He’s not going to elaborate too much on the upper management:

“The ring in the U.S. was 28 people, that’s just cooks. I have no idea about the big side. I didn’t want to know about that side. Those guys are dangerous, they kill people. My boss was a former Navy SEAL. He was so huge he looked like a Ninja Turtle.”

Hans/Pixabay

All records on him went into the shredder.

And, according to Marty, showing his current employees pictures of people he’d made dead was his preferred ‘motivational’ strategy,

“He preferred to use a hatchet. He chopped people up. He had one guy, he buried it halfway in his head — the guy fucked him out of a bunch of money, and he killed him.”

sand86/iStock

Shit, we weren’t expecting to use this photo again.

That seems like shoddy criming to us, but Marty claimed their phones all came from Ukraine, and were anonymized: “You don’t have your own number [when someone receives a call from you] it says number unavailable.” For added security, they all used Wickr, a super secure messaging app that’s great for journalists interviewing sensitive sources, and also, apparently, drug dealers. We have so, so much in common.